● 07.27.16

● Links 27/7/2016: New CrossOver, Blackmagic for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Linaro Developer Cloud has gone live, and users can apply to test an ARM-based server with Linux

Desktop

• Speculations were made that a Windows or a Linux version of the laptop would arrive in the future. The future is the present now and the Mi Notebook Air is ruling the internet search results.

Server

• Mention containers, and the first word that comes to mind these days is “Docker.” But container technology is far bigger than Docker alone, and it covers more use cases than simply delivering and running apps.

• One of the original major proponents of container technology on Linux, OpenVZ — or Virtuozzo in its commercial edition — is releasing a new version of its container solution, packaged as a full-fledged Linux distribution.

Kernel Space

• The usercopy protection was sent in today for pulling into the Linux 4.8 kernel.

• This user-copy protection support isn’t about any form of digital rights management but rather about safeguarding objects being copied to/from user-space. I covered this work in more detail a few days ago in Hardened Usercopy Appears Ready To Be Merged For Linux 4.8.

• With the Linux 4.7 kernel came initial work on SMR drives, a.k.a. Shingled Magnetic Recording. With Linux 4.8 the SMR drive support continues to be improved.

• Shingled Magnetic Recording is a magnetic storage tech used by HDDs with high storage density.

Graphics Stack

• Samuel Pitoiset continues being one of the most prolific Nouveau driver developers in recent times and today posted support for OpenGL tessellation on NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs and newer.

• For the past decade NVIDIA GPUs have shipped with a proprietary micro-controller they’ve called Falcon (also for Nouveau users you may recall it through “FUC” for the Falcon micro-controller), but a next-gen controller is being built now for future NVIDIA GPUs and it’s going to utilize the RISC-V ISA.

• Wayland’s Weston reference compositor picked up support for some new features this morning.

• Finally landing within Weston Git this morning is the longstanding relative pointer protocol. The Wayland relative pointer protocol is currently an unstable protocol and after numerous mailing list patch series is finally in Weston Git. Relative pointer support is important for first person shooter games and other applications.

• Remember the bad old days when GNU/Linux systems struggled without proper drivers for video-cards? Well, they’re gone with AMD. They’ve produced a very powerful line of powerful graphics cards designed for demanding professionals including those using GNU/Linux.

• AMD today announced that its powerful physically-based rendering engine is becoming open source, giving developers access to the source code.

• nables creators to bring ideas to life through high-performance applications and workflows enhanced by photorealistic rendering. Alongside Radeon ProRender, developers also have access to Radeon Rays on GPUOpen.com, a high-efficiency, high-performance, heterogeneous ray tracing intersection library for GPU, CPU or APU on virtually any platform. GPUOpen is an AMD initiative designed to assist developers in creating ground-breaking games, professional graphics applications and GPU computing applications with superior performance and lifelike experiences, using no-cost open development tools and software.

Applications

• China-based Linux distro Deepin has shown off its all-new desktop file manager. And to say it’s pretty is an understatement.

• Love to listen to the radio? My ol’ pal Lolly did. But let’s say you want to listen to the radio on Ubuntu. How do you do it? Well, the Ubuntu Software centre should always be the first dial you try, but you’ll need to sift through a load of static to find a decent app.

• reprotest 0.2 is available in PyPi and should hit Debian soon. I have tested null (no container, build on the host system), schroot, and qemu, but it’s likely that chroot, Linux containers (lxc/lxd), and quite possibly ssh are also working. I haven’t tested the autopkgtest code on a non-Debian system, but again, it probably works. At this point, reprotest is not quite a replacement for the prebuilder script because I haven’t implemented all the variations yet, but it offers better virtualization because it supports qemu, and it can build non-Debian software because it doesn’t rely on pbuilder.

• Kovid Goyal has released yet another maintenance update for his popular, open-source, free, and cross-platform Calibre ebook library management software, version 2.63.0.

• Calibre 2.63.0 arrives two weeks after the release of the previous maintenance update, Calibre 2.62.0, which introduced support for the new Kindle Oasis ebook reader from Amazon, as well as reading and writing of EPUB 3 metadata.

• Unfortunately, there aren’t many interesting features added in the Calibre 2.63.0 release, except for the implementation of Unicode 9.0 support in the regex engine of the Edit Book feature that lets users edit books that contain characters encoded with the recently released Unicode 9.0 standard.

Proprietary

• Blackmagic Design today announced that Fusion visual effects software is now available on the Linux platform. Linux is extremely popular in the world’s leading visual effects production companies and this new Linux release is a major announcement for the visual effects industry. This new Linux version of Fusion and Fusion Studio means visual effects artists can select their preferred computing platform, as Fusion is now available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. All project files are common, so customers can work collaboratively, even when different artists are running different platforms on the same job.

• Blackmagic Design released a pair of announcements, the first revealing that Fusion visual effects software is now available on the Linux platform, and second that it has release version 1.0.2 of Duplicator.

Instructionals/Technical

• The first time I installed Ubuntu on my computer, when I was sixteen, I was astonished by the number of filesystems that were available for the system installation. There were so many that I was left overwhelmed and confused. I was worried that if I picked the wrong one my system might run too slow or that it might be more problematic than another. I wanted to know which was the best.

• Since then, things have changed quite a bit. Many Linux distributions offer a ‘standard’ filesystem that an installation will default to unless otherwise specified. I think this was a very good move because it assists newcomers in making a decision and being comfortable with it. But, for those that are still unsure of some of the contemporary offerings, we’ll be going through them today.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Some good news! SWORDY has been given the green light to come to Linux & SteamOS by Microsoft, as the developer was a bit confused due to the Xbox One exclusive deal they have.

• Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell and Overlord II are all now available on Steam for Linux. Overlord II is also a brand new port today!

• Note: You may have issues if you previously purchased them from bundles and other random stores. VP has reached out to Codemasters to add Linux to them. If you’re only buying it now, you will be fine.

• Also, for the amount of complaints Mr Sweeney has, maybe it’s time for him to be productive about it and start moving his company towards an open platform. Anyone know an open platform? Lin-something? Oh yes, Linux, that’s it. Linux gives you SteamOS too remember now.

• Only Unreal Tournament (the new one) looks like it will have Epic’s support and possibly not even officially. The Linux version has been seriously lagging behind the Windows version, repeatedly breaking with major graphical issues and it still has no launcher on Linux. It may still be early, but they don’t seem like they’re really putting any effort into it.

• Croteam have continued developing their Vulkan backend for The Talos Principle and have pushed the last beta to stable and released another beta with more Vulkan work.

• Death Road to Canada is a brand new Linux game that released on Steam recently and a GOL user was kind enough to send me a copy to take a look. It’s a randomly generated road trip with Zombies with lots of encounters and annoying people to find.

• I’ve been having more fun with this than I probably should have. Exploring random abandoned “Y’all marts”, dismembering zombies and watching their brains and other organs fly out is grim and hilarious. What’s even more grim is walking over those organs then squishes them!

• For those still playing Minecraft, you may know that Mojang is working on a new launcher that doesn’t use Java (hooray!), but it might not run on Linux (boo!).

• HaxeFlixel, a free and open source cross-platform game framework that was used in the creation of Defender’s Quest is needing a bit of funding on IndieGoGo.

• They need only $3,000 (even more helps obviously), as it’s for a full time developer to work on it for a year. The core HaxeFlixel contributors are providing $3,000 themselves, so crowdfunding is just to top him up essentially.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE released the second maintenance update for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment series, which has already been adopted by several popular GNU/Linux operating systems.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Frederic Peters has been happy to inform Softpedia about the availability of the fourth development release for the upcoming GNOME 3.22 “Karlsruhe” desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

• So another two weeks have passed and it’s time to sum things up and reflect a little on the struggles and accomplishments that have marked this time period, which was quite a bumpy ride compared to the others, but definitely more exciting.

• It’s been a while since I reported on GNOME Keysign. The last few releases have been exciting, because they introduced nice features which I have been waiting long for getting around to implement them.

• I recently came across a copy of Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow That Works (book, 2005) by Goto and Cotler. The book includes a chapter on “Testing for Usability” which is brief but informative. The authors comment that many websites are redesigned because customers want to add new feature or want to drive more traffic to the website. But they rarely ask the important questions: “How easy is it to use our website?” “How easily can visitors get to the information they want and need?” and “How easily does the website ‘lead’ visitors to do what you want them to do?” (That last question is interesting for certain markets, for example.)

Distributions

New Releases

• Not only is our first 4.0.0 alpha release here – but it is here relatively on schedule. If all goes according to plan we will have something stamped as stable before September hits. I would just like to be clear that this is far from a polished / finished product. I would encourage anyone wanting to write a review to wait to do so until our stable release. If you are not someone who is interested in helping find issues please wait as well.

• Just one day after the announcement of the GA release of the Linux 4.7 kernel, the SparkyLinux developers inform their users that they can now test drive the new kernel from the unstable repository.

• Today, July 26, 2016, Softpedia was informed by the Clear Linux team about the availability of new software updates for the GNU/Linux operating system designed for the Intel architecture.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The latest openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot has updated KDE Applications in the repositories to version 16.04.3.

• Snapshot 20160724 had a considerably large amount of package updates for Tumbleweed KDE users, but other updates in the snapshot included updates to kiwi-config-openSUSE, Libzypp to version 16.1.3, yast2-installation to version 3.1.202 and Kernel-firmware to 2016071

• openSUSE Conference’16, Hackweek 14 and the various SUSE internal workshops are over. So it’s time for the YaST team to go back to usual three-weeks-long development sprints… and with new sprints come new public reports!

• With Leap 42.2 in Alpha phase and SLE12-SP2 in Beta phase our focus is on bugs fixing, so we don’t have as much fancy stuff to show in this report. Still, here you are some bits you could find interesting.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• For a while now, Fedora Quality Assurance (QA) is busy with building Taskotron core features and didn’t have resources for additions to tasks that Taskotron runs. That changed a few weeks back when we started running task-dockerautotest, task-abicheck and task-rpmgrill tasks in our development environment. Since then, we are happy with the results of those tasks. We deployed them to the production instance last week. Please note that the results of those tasks are informative only. Let’s introduce the tasks briefly.

• Fedora Women Day is celebrated to raise awareness and bring Fedora women contributors together. This is a great time to network with other women in Fedora and talk about their contributions and work in Fedora Project.

• The results are in! The Fedora Elections for the Fedora 24 release cycle of FESCo and the Council concluded on Tuesday, July 26th. The results are posted on the Fedora Voting Application and announced on the mailing lists. You can also find the full list of winning candidates below. I would also like to share some interesting statistics in this July 2016 Elections Retrospective.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu OTA-12, the latest update for Ubuntu Phone and Tablet, has begun roll out. We show you what’s new.

• Ubuntu OTA-12 is being released today by Canonical as the latest over-the-air update for Ubuntu tablet/phone users.

• Ubuntu OTA-12 is bringing wireless display support to supported devices, fingerprint unlock for the Meizu PRO 5 device, color emojis for the on-screen keyboard, improvements to the built-in web browser, and through the command-line it’s possible to install traditional Ubuntu apps as part of the converged experience. The OTA-12 update does bundle in Libertine.

• David Mohammed has been extremely happy to inform Softpedia about the availability of the Ubuntu Budgie Remix 16.04.1 operating system, as part of the recent Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) release.

• Today, July 27, 2016, Canonical will unveil the 12th Over-the-Air (OTA) software update for its Ubuntu mobile operating system that runs on supported Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices.

• Today, July 26, 2016, Canonical and The Document Foundation (TDF) announced that the company behind the popular Ubuntu operating system had joined the LibreOffice project Advisory Board.

• If you’re using the Ubuntu Linux OS on your personal computer, you are aware of the fact that the award-winning LibreOffice office suite is installed by default. Canonical chose to use LibreOffice as the default office suite for its widely-used GNU/Linux operating system since the first release of the open-source software in early 2011.

• Now that Canonical announced the availability of Snaps as universal binary packages for Ubuntu and other supported GNU/Linux distributions, many application developers decided to offer their software in the Snap package format, and it looks like The Document Foundation is among the first to adopt the latest Snappy technologies for LibreOffice.

• The Document Foundation today announced that Ubuntu parent company Canonical has joined The Document Foundation Advisory Board. The foundation said Canonical is to provide “experience and insights” to increase the use of LibreOffice in the enterprise and government. Canonical joins the likes of KDE, GNOME, Red Hat, SUSE, and Google on the board.

• The board’s main purpose is to represent the foundation’s sponsors and their needs to the Board of Directors, although the BoD isn’t under obligation to accept or act on any proposals made by the advisory board. The BoD does, on occasion, solicit advice and guidance from the advisory board and the advisory board does make proposals on behalf of their members. Some of the other members on the Advisory Board include those listed above as well as the Free Software Foundation, Collabora, Intel, the French government, CloudOn, City of Munich government, and AMD.

Devices/Embedded

• “chipKIT Lenny” is a PIC32-based Arduino Leonardo clone with more RAM and flash, and a multifunction microUSB port. Sneak preview boards are now available.

• Majenko Technologies has built an Arduino Leonardo compatible board supported by the open source chipKIT project, which like all chipKIT boards features a MIPS-based Microchip PIC32 microcontroller unit instead of an ATmega32u4. (See farther below for more on chipKIT.) The chipKIT Lenny was teased by the chipKIT project in late June, and is now being released by Majenko in a preview version priced at 19 UK Pounds (currently about $25).

• Electronic enthusiasts enjoy building projects using the BeagleBone development boards but interested in a new open source ADC board which has been specifically created for the BeagleBone.

• Axiomtek’s “CEM501” COM Express module runs Linux on Skylake CPUs, and offers triple display operation plus numerous SATA, USB, LAN, and PCIe interfaces.

Phones

Android

• Quick note from the smartphone wars amidst all the political coverage. Apple reported its Apr-Jun quarter results. iPhone sales 40.4 million, down 21% from the previous quarter.

• Google Play is rolling out onto Chromebooks, meaning the web-only operating system will soon offer millions of local applications. Three devices currently offer Android apps for users brave enough to switch to Developer builds of Chrome OS — the Asus Chromebook Flip, the 2015 Chromebook Pixel, and Acer’s Chromebook R11.

• As it happens, I recently reviewed the Chromebook R 11, and Digital Trends still has it kicking in our closet full of laptops. Jealous of all the cool screenshots I saw on Twitter, and curious about how well Android apps work on the platform, I decided to switch the OS to Developer builds and take a look for myself.

• Blackberry has launched its first touchscreen-only Android handset, in a bid to diversify its range of devices.

• The company says its Dtek50 smartphone offers improved security over rival Android devices, and will cost less than its previous handset Priv.

• It is the firm’s second Android handset after switching focus away from its struggling BB10 platform.

• Xiaomi is well known for their range of affordable smartphones and tablets, and the company continues to grow their device portfolio with some great options. After much anticipation, Xiaomi has finally taken the wraps off their latest smartphone offering at a launch event in Beijing earlier today. Here’s everything we know about the Xiaomi Redmi Pro!

• The Redmi Pro features a full metal unibody construction with a brushed metal finish, and up front is a 2.5D glass that covers the 5.5-inch Full HD OLED display. The change to OLED, from the usually standard in this price range IPS LCD, is a nice touch, and should provide a more vivid and pleasing viewing experience.

• It may have started as Google’s obligatory answer to the iPhone, but Android has grown into a much-beloved operating system that’s currently used by over 107 million people in the U.S. alone and almost one-and-a-half billion worldwide. Much of what makes Android special also distinguishes it from competitors: its power, versatility, and customizability.

• But this isn’t a love ode to Google’s popular software. Instead, we’re going to discuss some of the key differences between Google’s Android and Cyanogen OS, a modified, third-party version of Android that brings added features and gives users additional control over their devices. So let’s jump right in.

Free Software/Open Source

• Elio Qoshi is the person behind ura, a fascinating design studio dedicated to improving design in free and open source projects. As part of that mission, ura works with projects of all budgets. When we talk about open source, we’re usually talking code first and then—maybe—documentation second. Design is often an after-thought. But as designers like Elio get involved in open source culture, that order could eventually change.

• The digital photography and digital audio arenas have been going through a renaissance for some time now, with 360-degree photo tools arriving that provide panoramic and immersive views of locations and SurroundSound-like audio experiences. On the photography and virtual reality front, Google recently announced that it open sourced VR View, a tool that lets developers tembed 360-degree photo and video content into sites and native apps. The images can be viewed on Cardboard viewers or through a single-lens viewer.

• Now, Google has announced that it has open sourced Omnitone, a software tlibrary hat developers can use to integrate spatial audio with websites. The software is available now on GitHub under an Apache license.

• Google has posted two videos featuring the spatial audio dynamics that you can achieve with Omnitone. The videos depict musicians that you can listen in on from various spatial angles.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which incubates more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced the availability of Apache Mesos v1.0. In case you missed it, Mesos and related efforts from companies such as Mesosphere have already made a mighty impact on clustering, data center resource management and emerging data center operating systems.

• In February 2011 we were “dinged” for what was clearly a slowdown in registrations. Something was very wrong, they said. The ship was clearly on fire, they said, and the community manager was at the helm. Not surprisingly, my LinkedIn activity picked up quite a bit that month. So what happened? Funny story—it turns out, in February we enabled a CAPTCHA on our registration form and started blocking spammers rather effectively, drastically depressing the new registration count. A few months later, after the analyst report, spammers figured out a way to get around the CAPTCHA, and things returned to “normal”.

• Koding, a startup with technology for operating a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) for collaborative programming across devices, is announcing today that it’s open-sourcing its core technology and making it a part of GitLab, the open-source source-code repository service.

• With the push of a green button on GitLab repository pages, developers will be able to run any software on GitLab, with all the necessary dependencies already in place. “It almost feels like a part of GitLab,” Koding cofounder and CEO Devrim Yasar told VentureBeat in an interview.

Events

• Tucked into a corner of the Salt Lake Valley among the Rocky Mountains hides the largest community-organized free/open source technology conference you’ve never heard of. Weighing in at an impressive 1500 attendees, OpenWest is perhaps the third largest conference of its type in the United States, coming in behind SCaLE and LinuxFest Northwest.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• When we rolled out Firefox for iOS late last year, we got a tremendous response and millions of downloads. Lots of Firefox users were ecstatic they could use the browser they love on the iPhone or iPad they had chosen. Today, we’re thrilled to release some big improvements to Firefox for iOS. These improvements will give users more speed, flexibility and choice, three things we care deeply about.

SaaS/Back End

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• One week from today will mark the release of LibreOffice 5.2 as the open-source office suite’s latest major update.

• LibreOffice 5.2 features a new (optional) single toolbar mode, bookmark improvements. new Calc spreadsheet functions (including forecasting functions), support for signature descriptions, support for OOXML signature import/export, and a wealth of other updates. There are also GTK3 user-interface improvements, OpenGL rendering improvements, multi-threaded 3D rendering, faster rendering, and more.

Healthcare

• One of the most prolific VistA developers on Earth Astronaut, LLC has just completed its 14th consecutive month of releasing new VistA features that are clinically tested and in production.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) will be the integrator for telecommunications companies and cloud developers who want to use AT&T’s ECOMP platform to build their own software-centric network services. AT&T created and developed ECOMP and recently committed to releasing that code into open source. Amdocs will help companies deploy that open source software into their own networks. ECOMP is a vital tool for service providers struggling to meet today’s network demands while preparing for an even greater load in the next few years from applications like virtual reality and augmented reality, 4K video and the Internet of Things.

BSD

• In addition, one of the six release songs has been released early. There will be another compilation CD titled “The songs 5.2 – 6.0″ alongside the release.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• “We want people to criticize and comment on them,” Lozano explained. “People will be able to submit recipes that we can later brew and post online too, and then we can create open source recipes.”

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

Science

• Who’s your daddy? An unknown hominin species that bred with early human ancestors when they migrated from Africa to Australasia has been identified through genome mapping of living humans.

• The genome analysis also questions previous findings that modern humans populated Asia in two waves from their origin in Africa, finding instead a common origin for all populations in the Asia-Pacific region, dating back to a single out-of-Africa migration event.

• Modern humans first left Africa about 60,000 years ago, with some heading west towards Europe, and others flowing east into the Asia-Pacific region.

• In many ways, the migration of clinical scientists into technology corporations that are focused on gathering, analysing and storing information is long overdue. Because of the costs and difficulties of obtaining data about health and disease, scientists conducting clinical or population studies have rarely been able to track sufficient numbers of patients closely enough to make anything other than coarse predictions. Given such limitations, who wouldn’t want access to Internet-scale, multidimensional health data; teams of engineers who can build sensors for data collection and algorithms for analysis; and the resources to conduct projects at scales and speeds unthinkable in the public sector?

• Yet there is a major downside to monoliths such as Google or smaller companies such as consumer-genetics firm 23andMe owning health data — or indeed, controlling the tools and methods used to match people’s digital health profiles to specific services.

Health/Nutrition

• Dear Secretary Kerry: We are writing to express our concern about recent statements made by representatives of the State Department on issues regarding intellectual property (IP) and access to medicines in various settings, including proceedings in Colombia, several important United Nations fora, and in India.

• It’s as if the No Name brand was getting into the tobacco game. No more super slims. No choice of regular or king size. No logo on the filter. No colourful graphics next to the horrifying health warnings on packs, pouches and tins.

• Canada’s efforts to force tobacco manufacturers to use plain packaging will get a boost from a recent decision on similar measures in Uruguay, health advocates said Monday.

• The South American country successfully beat back an international trade challenge by Philip Morris International, which objected to rules requiring warning labels on 80 per cent of packaging and restricting each brand to only a single product.

• Rob Cunningham, a senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society, called the decision just the latest in a string of international defeats for the tobacco industry on the controversial issue of plain packaging.

• Italian lawmakers on Monday began discussing whether to legalize recreational cannabis, a fiercely-contested proposal likely to spark parliamentary battles.

• Loosening Italy’s marijuana laws is divisive, supported by those who say regulating the drug’s production and sale would strip mafia groups of an important source of income, but opposed by conservative groups and the Roman Catholic Church.

• Before the bill, backed primarily by deputies from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD) and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, even arrived for discussion in the lower house, opponents lodged more than 1,300 amendments.

Security

• A NEW ATTACK allows network operators, including anyone who owns a WiFi hotspot, to snoop on people’s browsing habits and see any webpage they visit.

• Fortunately, readers of the INQUIRER look at nothing more incriminating than the latest, hottest tech news, but other, less noble, netizens will no doubt be quaking in their onesies about now.

• The attack works by bypassing the HTTPS encryption which is supposed to prevent this happening. HTTPS would normally prevent the operator seeing the URLs visited by users, but a new technique abuses Web Proxy Autodiscovery and exposes browser requests to any code the network owner wants to fling at it.

• Itzik Kotler, CTO and co-founder, and Amit Klein, VP of security research, at security firm SafeBreach will demonstrate how the attack works at next week’s Black Hat conference in a talk entitled Crippling HTTPS with Unholy PAC.

• One of the main reason why all of us trust websites with HTTPS is because the surfing on such sites is invisible to hackers. Most of us are taught to believe that websites with HTTPS encryption are hacker and snooping proof.

• GuardiCore, a leader in internal data center security and breach detection, today made its Infection Monkey testing tool freely available to the public security community at large. Designed to test the resiliency of modern data centers against cyber attacks, the Infection Monkey was developed as an open source tool by GuardiCore’s research group, led by seasoned cyber security researcher Ofri Ziv.

Defence/Aggression

• When American firms dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. It’s good for one or two stories a year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state of the business come out.

• It’s not that no one writes about aspects of the arms trade. There are occasional pieces that, for example, take note of the impact of U.S. weapons transfers, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, or of the disastrous dispensation of weaponry to U.S. allies in Syria, or of foreign sales of the costly, controversial F-35 combat aircraft. And once in a while, if a foreign leader meets with the president, U.S. arms sales to his or her country might generate an article or two. But the sheer size of the American arms trade, the politics that drive it, the companies that profit from it, and its devastating global impacts are rarely discussed, much less analyzed in any depth.

• When American firms dominate a global market worth more than $70 billion a year, you’d expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. It’s good for one or two stories a year in the mainstream media, usually when the annual statistics on the state of the business come out.

• Eastern European countries have approved the discreet sale of more than €1bn of weapons in the past four years to Middle Eastern countries that are known to ship arms to Syria, an investigation has found.

• Thousands of assault rifles such as AK-47s, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons and heavy machine guns are being routed through a new arms pipeline from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula and countries bordering Syria.

• The suspicion is that much of the weaponry is being sent into Syria, fuelling the five-year civil war, according to a team of reporters from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

• Arms export data, UN reports, plane tracking, and weapons contracts examined during a year-long investigation reveal how the munitions were sent east from Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania.

• Amidst the fracas between China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei over claims in the South China Sea, it’s the fish and coral that are the silent victims. With every move made to bolster their claims over the region, these countries, particularly China, are slowly destroying its unique marine havens.

• Isis has claimed responsibility after least 44 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in a twin bombing in a predominantly Kurdish town in the north of Syria.

• Syrian state-TV said a truck loaded with explosives blew up on the western edge of the town of Qamishli, near the Turkish border.

• An 84-year-old priest was killed and four other people taken hostage by two armed men who stormed his church in a suburb of Rouen in northern France.

• The two attackers, who said they were from the so-called Islamic State (IS), slit Fr Jacques Hamel’s throat during a morning Mass, officials say.

• Police surrounded the church and shot dead both hostage-takers. French media named one of them as Adel K.

• One of the hostages is in a critical condition in hospital.

• There are two sources for the WhatsApp conversation. One was widely circulated on Twitter soon after the coup, and consists of a video purporting to show messages on the phone of a plotter. The other source is a series of photos obtained by a journalist with Al Jazeera, although no further information on them is given. Naturally, claims that these are authentic need to be treated with caution, and this is where the Bellingcat method of drawing on diverse sources shows its strength.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Record temperatures in the first half of 2016 have taken scientists by surprise despite widespread recognition that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, the director of the World Climate Research Program said.

• The earth is on track for its hottest year on record with June marking the 14th straight month of record heat, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said last week.

• Temperatures recorded mainly in the northern hemisphere in the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and “new highs” in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said.

• In a further announcement on Tuesday, the U.N. agency said it would examine whether a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit) reported in Kuwait last Thursday was a new high for the eastern hemisphere and Asia.

• The Greens have scraped into the final Senate seat in Tasmania and the Australian Electoral Commission has confirmed the return to Parliament of Labor’s Lisa Singh, who has been re-elected on a wave of public support after being dropped to an otherwise “unwinnable” spot on the ALP ticket.

• The AEC announced the 12 elected senators on Wednesday, with Green Nick McKim’s success coming at the expense of Liberal minister Richard Colbeck – another Tasmanian who fell victim to party power plays.

• The 2015 fires were the worst since 1997 when a strong El Niño also fanned widespread Indonesia forest fires, says the study published in Scientific Reports, which was a collaboration between scientists in King’s College London and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

• The practice of burning in Sumatra and Kalimantan, exacerbated by extended drought associated with El Niño, released 857 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from September to October 2015, which was 97 per cent of annual carbon emissions in Indonesia.

• Martin Wooster, one of the study’s authors and an earth observation science professor at King’s College London, says the data produced from the study were based on satellite observation and on-site measurement of the air in Palangkaraya, the capital city of Central Kalimantan province which experienced the thickest smog during the 2015 fires.

Finance

• Britain’s economy is now 7.7% higher than the pre-economic downturn peak, in the first quarter of 2008.

• The UK has recorded three-and-a-half years of uninterrupted economic growth, its third-longest streak since 1955. (But it’s probably over.)

• Gross domestic product increased 0.6% between April and June, including the days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the Office for National Statistics said today (July 27). The data—which was better than expected—was skewed towards the beginning of that period and only takes into account a week of a post-Brexit world. And most of the GDP figure is derived from estimates of economic activity, as opposed to hard data.

• The European Commission has appointed a chief Brexit negotiator but has made clear he will not engage with Britain until Article 50 is formally triggered – nor start work until 1 October.

• Michel Barnier, a former French government minister and ex-European Commission vice-president, will start work after the holiday season and then spend the next few months preparing the ground in Brussels for the negotiations. His appointment was announced by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who said he wanted “an experienced politician for this difficult job”.

• Describing Mr Barnier as “a skilled negotiator with rich experience in major policy areas relevant to the negotiations”, Mr Juncker said: “I am very glad that my friend Michel Barnier accepted this important and challenging task. I wanted an experienced politician for this difficult job.

• The US Olympics Committee has gone off the deep end, when it comes to intellectual property. It’s willing to sue anyone to protect their trademarks, even when the use is no real threat. But the committee’s latest claim is an entirely new level of absurdity.

• What’s getting the US Olympics Committee in a tizzy this time? Tweets. Specifically any company that tweets about the Olympic Games and isn’t a sponsor. ESPN obtained a letter from the US Olympic Committee chief marketing officer Lisa Baird who outlines the absurd demands.

• Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, likes to say that one of his firm’s core operating principles is “radical transparency” when it comes to airing employee grievances and concerns.

• But one employee said in a complaint earlier this year that the hedge fund was like a “cauldron of fear and intimidation.”

• The employee’s complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, which has not been previously reported, describes an atmosphere of constant surveillance by video and recordings of all meetings — and the presence of patrolling security guards — that silence employees who do not fit the Bridgewater mold.

• The hotel room was wired with cameras and microphones, and in it sat $30,000 in fake $100 bills. Miami Beach Detective Ricardo Arias, working undercover as an identity thief, flipped them in front of Michell Abner Espinoza. A “flash-roll,” it’s called, the kind you see in the movies where bad guys flick through wads of cash before holding it up in the air.

• For that $30,000, Espinoza had agreed to sell a slew of bitcoins, the almost unregulated virtual currency, which Arias’s character said he would exchange for stolen Russian credit-card numbers.

• The sting was designed to catch Espinoza, then 30 of Miami, laundering money. Florida law prohibits using financial transactions to “promote” illicit activity, such as, in this case, credit-card fraud.

• Ultimately, Arias arrested Espinoza on three felony counts of money laundering, capping a three-month investigation in 2014 into South Florida’s exchange of computerized money.

• The European Commission is proposing the creation of a database that will hold information on those using virtual currencies and that will record data on the users’ real-world identity, along with all associated wallet addresses.

• This is the first proposal part of an action plan that the EU got rolling after the Paris November 2015 terror attacks and that it officially put forward in February 2016 and later approved at the start of July 2016.

• As we wrote in our article from a few weeks back, the action plan, a reform of the Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD) so it would also include the terms “virtual currency,” was only approved by the (EU President) Juncker Commission.

• The highest-paid CEOs tend to run some of the worst-performing companies, according to new research.

• The study, carried out by corporate research firm MSCI, found that for every $100 (£76) invested in companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 (£202) over 10 years.

• But the same amount invested in the companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367 (£279) over a decade.

• Titled ‘Are CEOs paid for performance? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Equity Incentives’, the report looked at the salaries of 800 CEOs at 429 large and medium-sized US companies between 2005 and 2014 and compared it with the total shareholder return of the companies.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The fact that no lawsuit has yet been filed suggests that going public first is the latest method by which Popick is hoping to get paid by the campaign. Unless there are more details here, I’m not sure how much success Popick is likely to have with a lawsuit. It seems like a stretch from a legal angle. Without a written agreement, and with any verbal agreement sounding fuzzy at best, with Popick adding his own after-the-fact requirements for alternative compensation, I doubt any legal dispute stands much of a chance. Of course, it still doesn’t look good for the Trump campaign, which had a (somewhat ridiculous) viral sensation in their camp and appears to have squandered it:

• The FBI suspects the Russian government could be behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee after about 20,000 emails from the political organization were leaked late last week.

• But as one expert tells Business Insider, it would be “essentially impossible” to make a direct connection between the hackers and the Russian government.

• “I mean, it’s essentially impossible, 100%, given the advanced tactics these guys can deploy,” said Will Ackerly, a former cloud security architect at the National Security Agency and cofounder of the data security company Virtru. “It is relatively straightforward to design a misattribution system, where it looks like the attack is coming from somewhere else.”

• America’s corporate media have gobbled up the Hillary Clinton campaign’s spoon-fed lines that the real story of the WikiLeaks email revelations isn’t that they stole a US election, but rather that Putin and Russia are somehow interfering with the election to benefit Trump — despite zero evidence.

• Last month, DNC officials and security experts told the Washington Post that Russian government hackers gained access to the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, stealing login credentials and monitoring email and chats. Security firm Crowdstrike was hired by the DNC to investigate, and it concluded that two separate hacking cells with known ties to the Russian government compromised the DNC’s systems.

• This weekend, Wikileaks then posted the emails that had been stolen from the DNC in a searchable format online, revealing that the party’s top brass tried to help presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton clinch the nomination over Bernie Sanders, despite a claim that it was neutral. That prompted the Sunday resignation of the party’s leader, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

• Russia’s foreign minister refused to answer U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s question about Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacking allegations because he didn’t “want to use four-letter words.”

• Kerry raised the allegations July 26 in Laos at the ASEAN summit, and told reporters, “I raised the question and we will continue to work to see precisely what those facts are.” Kerry did not reveal Sergei Lavrov’s private response, but highlighted the FBI had opened an investigation into the allegations that Russian intelligence services were behind the DNC hack.

• While speaking ahead of talks at the ASEAN summit in Laos with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov soundly dismissed allegations that the Russian government was behind the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaks.

• Lavrov told a reporter, “I don’t want to use four-letter words”, in response to a question regarding Russia’s unproven involvement.

• John Nimmo, previously jailed for abusive messages, sent emails to Luciana Berger telling her she would ‘get it like Jo Cox’

• Hillary for America communications director Jennifer Palmieri discusses the campaigns take on last week’s WikiLeaks release of DNC emails. Palmieri speaks with McClatchy’s political editor Steve “Buzz” Thomma on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

• When Barack Obama became the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, he directed the national party to reject donations from federal lobbyists. “We will not take a dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs,” he said. “We’re going to change how Washington works. They will not fund my party.”

• The ban was perceived as symbolic and did little to stop the flow of corporate cash to the Democratic party, but it was heralded by government watchdog groups as a positive step towards limiting the influence of business interests over policymaking. Now, late into Obama’s presidency, the Democratic National Committee has begun accepting and soliciting lobbyist cash, and the White House has warmed to the idea of lobbyists playing a role in the party’s fundraising.

• Under the party’s new fundraising policy, detailed by the Washington Post in February, lobbyists cannot participate in DNC events with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden or their wives. But lobbyists can attend party events with White House staffers, according to a MapLight review of DNC emails. The messages were part of the nearly 20,000 emails from hacked DNC accounts that were released by WikiLeaks on Friday.

• The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, according to three people familiar with the matter.

• The missed opportunity is another blow to party officials already embarrassed by the theft and public disclosure of e-mails that have disrupted their presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia and led their chairwoman to resign.

• Computer security consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a two-month review, the people said. Following the advice, which would typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network, might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in their network for weeks — hackers who would stay for nearly a year.

• Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April. The theft ultimately led to the release of almost 20,000 internal e-mails through WikiLeaks last week on the eve of the convention.

• In March, WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30,000 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state. The 50,000 pages of documents span from June 2010 to August 2014; 7,500 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The State Department released the emails as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.

• Donald Trump on Wednesday urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, setting off howls of outrage from across the political spectrum for actually soliciting foreign espionage on his opponent. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said.

• Over the last year we’ve repeatedly noted how Putin’s Internet propaganda efforts go well beyond flinging insults in news story comment sections. Thanks to whistleblowing by the likes of Lyudmila Savchuk, we learned how Putin employs multiple factories operated by a rotating crop of shell companies whose sole purpose is to fill the internet with Putin-friendly drivel twenty-four-hours a day. Early reports noted how these efforts focused on what you’d expect from Putin: discrediting reporters, distorting Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, or opposing Finland’s entry into NATO.

• But a little more than a year ago, New York Times Magazine’s Adrian Chen decided to see just how deep that particular rabbit hole went.

• Buried in the avalanche of the WikiLeaks email drop that brought down Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is an interesting item closer to home — this one dealing with President Obama’s fundraising visit in February to the Atherton home of millionaire businessman and former state Controller Steve Westly.

• Not everyone in the exclusive Peninsula enclave has been happy about the president’s repeated drop-ins. After a fundraising event in 2013 wound up costing Atherton about $8,000, the City Council drafted an ordinance allowing the town to seek repayment from hosts of such large-scale gatherings.

• The leaked emails show that Atherton officials sent Westly an itemized invoice to cover $5,909 for the February fundraiser, including the pay for eight police officers, a police sergeant, a dispatcher and a public works crew.

• The emails also show that upon receiving the invoice, Westly wrote to Democratic National Committee officials, asking, “How you like us to handle this?

• “I will do whatever you would like here, including paying the bill,” messaged Westly, who has been eyeing a 2018 run for governor. “We are all very loyal to you and the president.”

• There’s been plenty of talk, of course, about whether or not Russia did the hack that exposed various Democratic National Committee emails and other documents. While we’ve already pointed out that this shouldn’t impact the newsworthy nature of the material leaked, it’s still an interesting story. We’ve highlighted some reasons to be skeptical of the claims attributing the hack to Russia, but it does appear that more and more evidence is pointing in that direction. Thomas Rid, over at Vice, has a pretty good analysis of why much of the evidence points to Russia as being behind the attack, and the FBI is now apparently on board with that as well. While I’d still prefer more evidence, at least at this point, it should be admitted that there’s quite a lot of evidence pointing in Russia’s direction making it, at the very least, the most likely suspect.

• [...]

• This is insane for a variety of reasons, and hopefully no one is seriously listening to this. First of all, hacking happens all the time. In fact, as Ed Snowden points out, revealed documents show that the US itself has authorized the hacking of foreign political parties. So if Russian hackers possibly doing that to us is a “cyberwar attack” and it’s the kind of thing we need to hit back on, then, uh, haven’t we been committing “cyberwar” on tons of other parties via the NSA — for which we, too, deserve retaliation?

• After a tension-filled opening day of the Democratic National Convention that saw Senator Bernie Sanders endorse his former rival Hillary Clinton, we host a debate between Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Ben Jealous, former NAACP president and CEO and a Bernie Sanders surrogate.

• With Donald Trump officially named the Republican presidential nominee last week and Hillary Clinton poised to become the Democratic candidate Thursday, you may feel like your options for the November general election are locked in.

• But you’re wrong. Jill Stein, a 66-year-old physician, is also in the running for the White House.

• Stein is on track to become the Green Party’s 2016 nominee for president, just like she was four years ago. And though a third-party candidate has never landed in the Oval Office, Stein is performing well among voters who are dissatisfied with the establishment and faced with choosing between Trump and Clinton. As of Tuesday morning, she was polling at about 3 percent support, according to RealClearPolitics.

• Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both now oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — so why were so many Bernie Sanders delegates yelling about it Monday night and waving anti-TPP signs over their head?

• The TPP has become a hot-button issue for a lot of progressives who want the party to take a more anti-corporate tone.

• Some of the opposition comes from bad memories of the job-losses that came in the wake of the NAFTA agreement in the 1990s. But the TPP is not actually a free-trade pact. It won’t lower tariffs, the most common trade barriers.

• In the earlier months of the Donald Trump campaign, many people I knew asked me to comment on the similarities between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Recently I have been asked to comment on direct connections between Trump and Putin. And now, with the release of nearly 20,000 emails apparently stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s email server by Russian hackers, has come the suggestion that Putin may actually be interfering in the US election to help get Trump elected. These ideas—that Trump is like Putin and that he is Putin’s agent—are deeply flawed.

• Imagine that your teenage child has built a bomb and has just set it off in your house. The house is falling down all around you—and you are blaming the neighbor’s kid, who threw a pebble at your window. That’s what the recent Putin fixation is like—a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.

• The only experts cited work for a company hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the hack. There is no indication of any neutral third party investigation. The company, Crowdstrike, issued a publicly available report on what they found.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says his organization plans to publish “a lot more material” concerning elections in the U.S.

• “This is having so much political impact in the United States,” he told CNN on Tuesday, referencing last Friday’s leak of 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

• Assange said Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is trying to disrupt focus on the messages by blaming Russia for their release.

• “What we have right now is the Hillary Clinton campaign using a speculative allegation about hacks that have occurred in the past to try and divert attention from our emails, another separate issue that WikiLeaks has published,” he said.

• “I think this raises a very serious question, which is that the natural instincts of Hillary Clinton and the people around her, that when confronted with a serious domestic political scandal, that she tries to blame the Russians, blame the Chinese, etc,” Assange added. “If she does that when she’s in government, that’s a political, managerial style that can lead to conflict.”

• Bernie Sanders delegates and supporters speak out about the DNC email scandal, the Democratic Party and how they should move forward. Delegates on the floor during the Democratic National Convention often booed as Clinton was mentioned. USA TODAY

• Compared to the sturm und drang swirling around last week’s Republican National Convention, the Democratic convention this week seemed likely to be a fairly placid affair. Then, as Democrats prepared to gather in Philadelphia to officially nominate Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate, Wikileaks released a dramatic cache of hacked emails sent and received by members of the Democratic National Committee.

• The emails confirmed many Sanders supporters’ fears—previously derided as conspiracy theories—about both anti-Sanders sentiment within the DNC and the role of money in politics. The emails showed, among other things, that supposedly neutral DNC staffers were actively hostile to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and gave donors access to president Barack Obama and other key White House staffers.

• Email exchanges involving top officials at the Democratic National Committee released along with private documents by WikiLeaks show that DNC officials hoped to reward top donors and insiders with appointments to federal boards and commissions in coordination with the White House.

• The revelations give an inside look into how the Democratic Party attempted to leverage its access and influence with the White House to bring in cash.

• In an April 20, 2016 email, DNC National Finance Director Jordan Kaplan canvassed what appears to be the committee’s finance department – its fundraising office – for names of people (mainly donors) to reward with federal appointments on boards and commissions.

• That email exchange yielded a list compiled by DNC Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer and emailed to Kaplan on April 26 titled “Boards and Commissions Names_Final,” which listed the names of twenty-three DNC donors and insiders.

• The American Legislative Exchange Council will push bills to protect failing charter schools, silence political speech, and obstruct environmental protections in the ALEC 2016 agenda introduced at its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week.

• ALEC faces renewed public attention as it gears up for the annual meeting, where corporate lobbyists sit side-by-side with state legislators in luxury hotels to vote as equals on “model bills” that then get pushed to become law in states across the country.

• As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, Donald Trump chose an ALEC ally, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, as his running mate, while his party’s 2016 platform was clearly stamped in the Koch-fueled ALEC mold.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The Russian government’s state censorship organization, Roskomnadzor (technically its telecom regulator) has been especially busy lately as the government has continued to crack down on websites it doesn’t like. However, as pointed out by Fight Copyright Trolls, it appears that Roskomnadzor may have gone a bit overboard recently, in response to a court ruling that had a massive list of sites to be banned (over a thousand pages). Apparently, as part of that, various sites associated with Comodo were all banned. That’s pretty bad for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that Comodo remains one of the most popular issuers of secure certificates for HTTPS.

• Any time we discuss the segment of our population that is still, despite all evidence to the contrary, pushing anti-vaccination conspiracy theories out into the ether, the comments section is inevitably invaded by these proponents. I know I can’t stop it, so just go ahead and leave what I’m sure will be your well-reasoned, science-backed arguments as to why we shouldn’t trust one of the most life-saving kinds of medicine ever invented.

• That said, this is not a post about the plausibility that vaccinations are the reason for all the world’s ills. It is instead a post about how the distributors of the upcoming sure-to-be smash hit film about the horror of vaccinations, creatively entitled Vaxxed, are also going around threatening people arguing against its message with defamation for pointing back at the filmmakers’ own words.

• Meet Fiona O’Leary of Ireland. Fiona is an advocate for autistic children, helping to run a group called ART (Autistic Rights Together) as well as a Tumblr page dedicated to dispelling the myths of autism and vaccines. On that Tumblr page and on social media, O’Leary has often set her sights on the makers and distributors of Vaxxed, including producers Polly Tommey and Del Bigtree. Included in her pushback, O’Leary points out some rather unfortunate comments both have made about autistic children, as well as interviews and videos in which Tommey in particular pushes religious faith to treat autism. Through it all are the calls for parents to not vaccinate their children.

• Cinema Libre Studio, the distributor of the dishonest Andrew Wakefield anti-vaccination fiction-film, Vaxxed, has threatened an Irish autism-rights advocate with defamation.

• Censorship in society and a second EU referendum were subject to debate when two schools competed against each other.

• Russian ISPs have been ordered by the Moscow City Court to block access to a website for 15 days over one allegedly plagiarised story that it ran.

• The story—a travel piece about what to do in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan—was first published by the popular Russian site Gazeta.ru back in March, but then apparently plagiarised by Story-media.ru.

• It is not currently possible to check whether the two texts are indeed the same, since Story-media.ru is currently offline, and there is no copy on Archive.org.

• An upcoming Malayalam writer was allegedly attacked by a group of people for using the word ‘padachon’ (the creator) in the title of his soon to be released book at Koottanad in the district.

• ‘Padachon’ is a colloquial Malayalam word used to refer to ‘God, the Creator’. It is used generally by the Muslim community in the state.

• Kuwait has handed one of its parliamentarians, Abdul-Hamid Dashti, to 11 years and six months in prison for insulting Saudi Arabia and a seperate sentence for insulting Bahrain.

• He was tried as well for defaming Kuwait’s judiciary.

• In March, the National Assembly of Kuwait, approved the claim presented for lifting Dashti’s parliamentary immunity. The request was based on the case on a homeland security lawsuit issued against Dashti for incitement against Saudi Arabia.

• The tweet was taken down minutes later and the official Twitter account explained that someone with “unauthorized access” had posted the tweet and it was not a reflection of the Colorado GOP’s official stance.

• This led to a brief internet wildfire, where CRC reps were interviewed by reporters about the tweet and enraged Trump supporters [also: 4chan] — believing the fix was in — began posting threatening messages to and about Colorado GOP leaders. So far, so internet.

• The CRC took this a step further though, attempting to sue the “Doe” with allegedly “unauthorized access” for breaching the “threat to public health or safety” clause of the CFAA. The original complaint [PDF] shows the CRC is perhaps far better at electioneering than investigating.

• AWARD winning actor, Sylvanos Mudzvova, who was recently in Norway for the Bergen Afro Arts Festival, said Zimbabwe’s censorship laws were archaic and draconian compared to other progressive societies.

• Netsweeper is a small Canadian company with a disarmingly boring name and an office nestled among the squat buildings of Waterloo, Ontario. But its services—namely, online censorship—are offered in countries as far-flung as Bahrain and Yemen.

• In 2015, University of Toronto-based research hub Citizen Lab reported that Netsweeper was providing Yemeni rebels with censorship technology. In response, Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert revealed in a blog post on Tuesday, Netsweeper sued the university and Deibert for defamation. Netsweeper discontinued its lawsuit in its entirety in April.

• [...]

• When reached over email, Deibert said Citizen Lab is not offering comments to the press on the lawsuit. Netsweeper did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

• If the lawsuit had gone to court, Deibert wrote that Citizen Lab intended to lean on the 2015 Protection of Public Participation Act, which was designed to thwart litigation against organizations acting in the public interest.

• “Citizen Lab does rigorous research into censorship, surveillance, and digital attacks and it is clearly in the public interest for them to be able to share those results,” Brenda McPhail, director of the surveillance project at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, wrote Motherboard in an email. “We support their right to freely disseminate and discuss their important work.”

• A lawsuit that accused the USDA of censoring its scientists in violation of their free speech rights has been dismissed by a federal judge.

• Last year, the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, filed a complaint claiming that USDA’s “scientific integrity policy” unconstitutionally muzzled scientists to appease “corporate stakeholders.”

• The USDA policy, issued in 2013, states that “scientists should refrain from making statements that could be construed as being judgments of or recommendations on USDA or any other federal government policy, either intentionally or inadvertently.”

• According to PEER, the policy effectively prohibited USDA researchers from making public statements about controversial subjects, stifling scientific discourse about agriculture.

• Specifically, the complaint pointed to Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist for USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, who was prevented from speaking publicly about certain subjects.

• For example, USDA barred Lundgren from speaking to the media about the impact on non-target insects from crops that are genetically engineered to have pesticidal qualities, the complaint said.

• A new court battle is expected after an employment tribunal in South Africa ordered the state broadcaster, SABC, to reinstate four journalists. They’d been sacked for fighting its policy of not showing footage of violent protests. But William Bird from the campaign group Media Monitoring Africa says the arguments are set to rage on.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Seven weeks ago, I published a blog post saying that Jacob Appelbaum had left the Tor Project, and I invited people to contact me as the Tor Project began an investigation into allegations regarding his behavior.

• Since then, a number of people have come forward with first-person accounts and other information. The Tor Project hired a professional investigator, and she interviewed many individuals to determine the facts concerning the allegations. The investigator worked closely with me and our attorneys, helping us to understand the overall factual picture as it emerged.

• In 2012, the Democratic party platform document (released every four years at the Democratic National Convention) made barely a mention of internet privacy and how it affects US citizens. But that was before Edward Snowden’s revelations. This year, as the DNC kicks off in Philadelphia, the new Democratic Party platform addresses the privacy concerns brought to light in 2013. It also gets into the recent battle over encryption that was highlighted by the FBI trying to force Apple to decrypt an iPhone connected to a murder suspect.

• Disaster stories involving the Internet of Things are all the rage. They feature cars (both driven and driverless), the power grid, dams, and tunnel ventilation systems. A particularly vivid and realistic one, near-future fiction published last month in New York Magazine, described a cyberattack on New York that involved hacking of cars, the water system, hospitals, elevators, and the power grid. In these stories, thousands of people die. Chaos ensues. While some of these scenarios overhype the mass destruction, the individual risks are all real. And traditional computer and network security isn’t prepared to deal with them.

• Classic information security is a triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. You’ll see it called “CIA,” which admittedly is confusing in the context of national security. But basically, the three things I can do with your data are steal it (confidentiality), modify it (integrity), or prevent you from getting it (availability).

• There are two questions that come up pretty frequently when I tell people that I document and write about network infrastructure. The first one is, So, where’s the cloud? (Spoiler: mostly, northern Virginia, but also it’s not a cloud and you should really stop calling it that.) The other is, Why do you want to let terrorists destroy the internet? The implication is that by mapping out the internet’s geography, I’m basically offering up a blueprint for destroying it.

• Anxiety about physical infrastructure security is understandable. Sometimes the threats to infrastructure security can feel a little over the top, as in the case of the New York Times report on the possibility of Russian submarine cable taps. It isn’t a purely speculative concern, however. Last year, a spate of mysterious fiber optic cable cuts in northern California left parts of the region disconnected for hours.

• My book, Networks of New York, is an illustrated guide to identifying network infrastructure, including internet cables. Conceivably, this could guide a would-be vandal to their targets—but the primary method they’d use to find those targets is a tactic explicitly already used to keep cables safe. Labeling buried utilities with color-coded flags, posts, or spray paint is a well-established part of street excavation. If one utility provider needs to do work that requires digging up a road, they need to know what’s buried under that road so they don’t end up damaging anything else buried nearby.

• The EU’s “Cookie Law” is a complete joke and waste of time. An attempt to regulate privacy in the EU, all it’s really served to do is annoy millions of internet users with little pop up notices about cookie practices that everyone just clicks through to get to the content they want to read. The EU at least recognizes some of the problems with the law and is working on a rewrite… and apparently there’s an interesting element that may be included in it: banning encryption backdoors. That’s via a new report from European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Giovanni Buttarelli, who was put in charge of reviewing the EU’s ePrivacy Directive to make it comply with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is set to go into effect in May of 2018.

• THE HEARING into Privacy International’s challenge to the UK security services’ collection of bulk communications and personal data opened in London on Monday, and previously secret documents revealed for the first time the extent of government surveillance into ordinary citizens’ communications.

• This follows a ‘dirt dump’ in April which showed that successive home secretaries have allowed this to carry on since at least 2005.

• The documents provide evidence that MI5, MI6 and GCHQ collected data on every citizen in the UK, including location information, telephone numbers dialled and calls received, as well as metadata regarding time, date and duration of calls.

• In addition, the security services are accused by Privacy International of collecting data in bulk via the internet, including browsing history, IP addresses visited, instant messaging data and operating systems. The bulk collection of personal information even includes physical post data.

• Director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960s Western The Magnificent Seven is expected to kick off the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, which will include movies about whistle-blower Edward Snowden and former US president Lyndon Johnson among the usual Oscar hopefuls.

• TOR anonymity network is one of the most useful online security measures that we’ve got.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Obama administration’s top official overseeing how intelligence agencies handle whistleblower retaliation claims has lodged his own complaint, alleging he was punished for disclosing “public corruption.”

• Daniel Meyer, who previously oversaw the Defense Department’s decisions on whistleblowing cases, also says he was targeted for being gay, according to records obtained by McClatchy.

• Meyer made the allegations in a complaint before the Merit Systems Protection Board, an administrative panel that handles employment grievances from federal employees, after another agency rejected his claims.

• As one whose early early political education, after I was old enough to quit listening to my father and think for myself, came largely from the various civil disobedience factions in the 1960s, it’s heartening to see that disobedience now has an award. So far it’s one off, but if successful might be repeated and perhaps be awarded annually. The award will also offer the recipient more than mere accolades, as it’s attached to a $250,000 prize.

• That’s a pretty cool idea for a prize. And I particularly like Michael Petricone’s suggestion that the award should be named after Aaron Swartz, who of course was engaged in a great number of civil disobedience projects. And, unfortunately, one of them involved MIT turning on him, leading him to getting arrested and charged with a variety of ridiculous charges. Since then, there has been a struggle among many at MIT to figure out how that happened and what the university should do to prevent similar things in the future. Naming this kind of award after him would be a great start.

• We recently wrote about the book The Idealist, about Swartz and the world of free culture (and had the author, Justin Peters, appear on our podcast for an excellent two-part discussion about the book). One things that becomes clear from the book was the absolute disbelief by Swartz and his family of the fact that MIT refused to support Swartz after his arrest. The university basically turned its back on him completely. It’s something that the university still ought to do something about, and naming this award after Swartz would be a step in the right direction.

• The Catalan government has intensified its war of words with Spain by vowing to use its democratic mandate to forge a separate Catalan state with or without the approval of Madrid.

• Catalonia is preparing to defy Spain’s constitutional court this week by debating the conclusions of a working group on sovereignty, nine months after the Catalan parliament put forward a resolution calling for the “beginning of a process of the creation of an independent Catalan state”.

• The Obama administration’s top official overseeing how intelligence agencies handle whistleblower retaliation claims has lodged his own complaint, alleging he was punished for disclosing “public corruption.”

• Daniel Meyer, who previously oversaw the Defense Department’s decisions on whistleblowing cases, also says he was targeted for being gay, according to records obtained by McClatchy.

• Meyer made the allegations in a complaint before the Merit Systems Protection Board, an administrative panel that handles employment grievances from federal employees, after another agency rejected his claims.

• Meyer’s claims add to a barrage of allegations that the federal government’s handling of defense and intelligence whistleblower cases is flawed.

• In the complaint, Meyer, who once worked for the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office, accused his former Defense Department bosses of “manipulation of a final report to curry favor” with then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

• Police are investigating the death of a British woman in Pakistan after her husband claimed she was the victim of an “honour” killing for marrying a man from outside the family allegedly against her parents’ wishes.

• Samia Shahid, a beauty therapist from Bradford, died on Wednesday while visiting relatives in Pandori village near Mangla Dam in northern Punjab, the Foreign Office confirmed.

• Shahid’s local MP, Naz Shah, has demanded that authorities in Pakistan exhume her body and commission an independent autopsy.

• The police officer leading the investigation in Pakistan told the Guardian he had sent samples from the body to the country’s top forensics lab in Lahore on Tuesday.

• Mohammad Aqeel Abbas, the station house officer for Jhelum district who is investigating the case, said a postmortem was carried out immediately after Shahid died and she was then buried in her village graveyard. There were no visible injuries or signs of violence on her body, he said.

• Politicians tend to quit over scandals or sheer public outcry, but fake social networking accounts? That’s new. Illinois House representative Ron Sandack has resigned after spending weeks battling with “cyber security issues” — namely, people creating multiple impersonating Facebook and Twitter accounts. The fight made him “re-evaluate” his role in office and whether or not it was worth missing “important family events” to be there, he says.

• A swimming pool in the town of Geldern in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany is home to bathers who prefer a more “natural” form of swimming. Nudists at the pool were verbally abused by a group of young Muslim men who threatened them because they consider swimming in the nude ‘indecent behaviour’. The group of Muslims not only threatened the male bathers but also spat upon them and several women and children, reports Junge Freiheit.

• A total of six Muslim men were involved in the incident and are described by witnesses as being in their mid 20’s, all with full Islamic-style beards. The men insulted and threatened the nudists in both German and Arabic, yelling “Allahu akbar” at the bathers along with other Arabic insults.

• Chicago’s per capita homicide rate climbed over the last decade, and the chances of an African-American being killed in the city spiked drastically, according to a new report.

• Two people from Milwaukee took to the national stage at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to present two very different perspectives on one of the most divisive issues of our time, the shootings of unarmed African Americans by police and civilians.

• The conventions took place against a backdrop of traumatic news stories. The shooting death of Philando Castile and its dramatic aftermath, live-streamed on Facebook by his girlfriend, sparked national protests. At one protest in Dallas, Texas, five police officers were shot and killed by an African American military veteran who had served in Afghanistan. This was followed by the shootings of police in Baton Rouge. The very next week, Charles Kinsey, an African American caregiver for an autistic adult, was shot by police while he was on the ground with his arms raised.

• While the terrible events and constant media churn left many wondering if the nation was coming apart at the seams, some fanned the flames of division.

• Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, an African American and right-wing commenter for Fox News, who has blamed several of the victims of police killings, took to the floor in full dress uniform: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear: Blue Lives Matter!”

• United States President Barack Obama should press visiting Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to address the Singapore government’s severe restrictions on fundamental freedoms, Human Rights Watch said today. President Obama will meet with Prime Minister Lee in Washington, DC, on 2 August 2016.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• We think of the internet as disrupting, and sometimes replacing, traditional institutions and industries, as it has grown and changed. There are now more than 3.2 billion users, and over time, a handful of companies — Facebook, Apple and Google among them — have come to have an outsize influence on how we use the internet.

• Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who studies the social impact of technology, noticed a troubling problem in August 2014. She was following the news on Facebook and Twitter, and realized that Twitter was full of updates after the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black resident of Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer.

• Meanwhile, Facebook’s algorithm — with its emphasis on what people “like” — largely missed the protests. “I’d go to Facebook and I’d see nothing,” Tufekci told Freakonomics recently. “These complex algorithms are having all these downstream effects. … Facebook is unleashing these computer programs that are designed to make Facebook advertiser-friendly and that are designed to keep us on the site.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Last week we noted how the cable industry was distorting the definition of copyright to try and fend off the FCC’s attempt to bring competition to the cable box market. Through misleading editorials and leveraged relationships with beholden lawmakers, the cable industry has been successfully convincing some regulators that we can’t bring competition to the cable box or we’ll face a piracy and copyright apocalypse.

• Dig deeper and you’ll find that copyright has nothing to do with the proposed changes being tabled. The FCC’s proposal simply requires (pdf) that cable providers deliver their existing programming, sans CableCARD, to third party set tops with an eye toward boosting competition. The FCC has stated repeatedly that under their plan, cable providers can utilize the standards and copyright protection of their choice to make this happen, keeping existing DRM in place (for better or worse). Again, it’s important to understand that for cable providers this fight is about control and $21 billion in annual rental fees.

• South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) appears to be meeting its detractors halfway with a new intellectual property consultative framework it says will help pave the way for consultative engagement with IP stakeholders both inside and outside of government.

• Despite being the global leader of generic drug manufacturing, access to hepatitis C treatment in India remains out of reach for a large portion of the population, a civil society group has said in a new paper. The authors call for India to work on a national programme of prevention and treatment of hepatitis, and warn against voluntary licences developed by multinational pharmaceutical companies.

• World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevêdo today said he would consider a second mandate at the head of the organisation. He also described a positive momentum in the organisation in the first semester of 2016, after two successful ministerial conferences, with members coming up with new ideas. About Brexit, potential scenarios are being explored but it seems a lot of renegotiations might be on the United Kingdom’s plate.

Copyrights

• Blocking torrent and streaming sites is a regular occurrence in many countries but the practice is now extending to other areas. Following a complaint by Russian news site Gazeta, the Moscow City Court has ordered a news portal to be blocked by ISPs after it ‘pirated’ a tourism article.

• Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde says that the “piracy” scene needs more innovation if it wants to sustain itself. In the wake of the KickassTorrents shutdown, he argues that the current ecosystem relies too heavily on a few large sites. More decentralization is the key to solve this vulnerability.

• So for years and years and years, every time a musician or a group whined about politicians using their music at an event, we’d point out that they have no legal basis to complain. Assuming either the venue or the campaign (or both) had the proper blanket licenses from ASCAP/BMI/SESAC no other permission was needed. That’s actually part of the point of the structure of those blanket performance licenses. Everyone recognizes that it would be virtually impossible to play music publicly without such a blanket license structure. And so, every time a musician complains that the use was “unauthorized,” they’re almost certainly wrong. In fact, we pointed that out (again) for the nth time earlier this week. Now, as we’ve said all along, we still think smart politicians and smart campaigns should first seek out musicians who don’t mind (or, better yet, who endorse the candidate), because otherwise they’re just giving someone famous an easy platform to slam them. But, from a legal standpoint, we’ve always pointed out that there’s basically no legitimate argument here, and people who toss around non-copyright theories like publicity rights and Lanham Act arguments are generally wrong.

• But… we forgot about one thing. Copyright law is so screwed up that there actually may be a case where the law does require permission. And it has to do with pre-1972 sound recordings. If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know that we’ve discussed this issue many times in the past. Historically, while compositions were covered by copyright, under the 1909 Copyright Act sound recordings were not. This resulted in a patchwork of state laws (and state commonlaw) that created special forms of copyright at the state level. Eventually, sound recordings were put under federal copyright law, but it only applied to works recorded after February 14, 1972. Works recorded before that are not under federal copyright law, but remain basically the only things under those state copyright laws (the 1976 Copyright Act basically wiped out state copyright laws for everything but that one tiny thing).

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